by Yoram Kaniuk
When a crow swooped down on him, he tried to flee but couldn't budge from his place. Yossel, who contemplated Rebecca's birth, understood that the devil came back to lodge in the city and Rebecca Secret Charity accepted the birth of Rebecca Sorka with a blessing. That was the anniversary of a bold struggle remembered by only three men, the struggle between the rabbi of Lody and Rabbi Israel of Koznitz.
The fate of Napoleon Bonaparte at the siege of Moscow then hung in the balance. The rabbi of Lody, nine hundred kilometers from Moscow, feared the secularization of the Jews that would come with the destruction of Moscow, while the rabbi of Koznitz thought the fate of the Jews would be better if Napoleon won. After a bitter struggle between the opponents, the two decided that if neither side overcame, the war would intensify and a bitter fate was in store for the Jews. Hence, the question was not only to bring the war to a quick conclusion, but also which side should lose. On Sunday, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Israel immersed in the ritual bath, prepared himself for prayer, and wanted to get to the blowing of the shofar before the rabbi from Lody started praying. When he put the shofar to his mouth his heart grew faint and he felt that the rabbi of Lody took the blasts from him without taking the shofar from him. And so he shouted: He came before me, snatched the blasts and won! The device of snatching the blasts, brought Napoleon his immediate downfall. The rabbi grew excited in private and at night they said they saw tears wandering around his room seeking to return to his face. Meanwhile, deaf Yossel returned to the city. He told how the tombstone of Rebecca daughter and wife of Secret Charity had gone for a walk; the refugees in the synagogue interrupted and called yearningly to their city and the smell of burning stood in the air and Rebecca Sorka sucked slowly and important things that should have been done were forgotten. Leah Sorka, Rebecca's mother, didn't forget and said, They should have taken the demon out of Rebecca and now it's too late.
Avrum ben ha-Rav Kriv begat the Vulgar of Vilna. The Vulgar begat the Prayer of Israel who begat Isaac Unworthy in His Faith May He Live Long, who saw the fire and his eyes grew dim. Unworthy in His Faith May He Live Long begat Secret Charity. Secret Charity met the messiah Frank riding on a horse with a naked woman rabbi. The messiah carried a torch and coined phrases good for all times. Secret Charity stood at a window on a winter night and saw the messiah get into his daughter's virginal bed. That was after he carried the Torah in a splendid ceremony whose cursed origin is remembered by the old people. In those turbulent years visions were seen as sunsets or rain are seen today. Secret Charity saw the Shekhinah in Exile and his heart broke at the injustice and he wanted to repair. He knew the world had to be purified to fit the letters of the Torah that were created before it was created. Because the messiah Frank converted, Secret Charity understood that messianism was a secret to be hidden and not to be revealed, and that there was an urgent need to be ravished, to confound the world to restore it to its origin. After the death of the convert messiah he stopped the moon for two whole days and the moon didn't set. Profoundly contemptuous of his ability to change the creation without knowing if that was the right way, he married a woman, went into the cellar, and lived buried there his whole life. He performed rituals, made calculations with the letters of the Torah, and discovered that in a certain order the words of the Torah sound like a melody that subdues all grief. From the rabbi of Lody, he learned to snatch shofar blasts and even groans of Jews who didn't know their groans were snatched by him. He decided to tell his fabrications only to himself; that way he could not believe them. Upstairs in his house, his wife sold bread, challahs, and bagels, and refused to admit the existence of her husband. She raised the sixteen children he'd beget in brief but very joyous sorties to her room, and there he also told her about his ravishment in the cellar, about the repairs he made in his solitude, and his children now and then were exiled to the cellar to take part in rituals where they saw their father connecting phrases. Then Secret Charity died full of yearnings for the messiah, and the most beautiful of his daughters was Rebecca Secret Charity whose grave shifted the day Rebecca Sorka was born a hundred years later. And Boaz Schneerson, the grandson and son of Rebecca, eighty years later, when he'll return safe from the war, will shout at his grandmother: Why didn't I die? I could have died, I had no reason to live when my friends died, why did you say Psalms for me all the days of the war and save me? and he hit her.
When Rebecca, the most beautiful of Secret Charity's daughters, was twelve years old and sister to eleven brothers and sisters whose number was to be great, the baker whose wife sang in the room next to the bakery died and the house collapsed on them. Rebecca went to the study house and asked some well-known saints who were steeped in prayer to tie themselves to the incense bowl and rise to heaven with it. They had to do that to challenge the Holy One Blessed Be He, she said, they tried to bribe heaven with anger, not supplication, their tears flow in vain and aren't seen there. Anger had always nested in her and the old men in the study house weren't embarrassed and tried to go back to their prayers. When she stood there her womanly fear was a soft and cunning loveliness and even the saints in their time couldn't resist the temptation and they thought forbidden thoughts about her body rustling with gloomy joy shrouded in dark ancient mold and steeped in passion. Rebecca's mother, who was busy selling challahs and bread and bagels, wanted to rid her daughter of the anger with a quick marriage. After refusing thirty-one fellows, some of whom even fled from her because of her venomous tongue, she saw her mother weeping. Her father had recently died and was buried standing up as he requested in his will, in a Christian-style coffin, and around her sat her fifteen brothers and sisters waiting to be married and she said: There's no point crying. Times were hard and because of concerns for livelihood and fears nobody went out then to pull out messiahs and Rebecca remained alone with signed and unsigned excommunications and declarations, many written by her thirty-one defeated suitors.
One day her mother took her to a distant city and gave her to some childless relatives. The old couple were dying in their room and Rebecca nursed them in their illness, started sewing in their workshop, and when they died, on that day and at that hour, she inherited the house with the little workshop next to it. Sitting in the workshop, Rebecca met one of the descendants of the converted messiah, nobody dared to get close to him even though he had returned to his faith long ago and grew cherries in a distant orchard. Rebecca betrothed herself to him and the city made a fuss. He was a quiet and strong fellow and was called Son of the Prostitute. Two days after the betrothal he vomited blood in the middle of the street and collapsed amid incomprehensible shouts. In death, his face was green and his eyes turned around. Rebecca carried him home on her back, took the washing implements and the shrouds from under the old folks' bed, washed his body, purified it, and wrapped it in a tallith. And then she wanted to marry her fiance. Nobody had heard of marrying a dead man and so they called for Rabbi Kriegel, Rebecca's uncle who went from the Land of Israel to a place called America and stopped on the way to visit his family and was an expert in Jewish customs in Yemen, North Africa and Persia, and Rabbi Kriegel, who would later come to Providence, Rhode Island, brought evidence and proofs and when the marriage canopy was set up in the cemetery the men trembled and the women hid behind the trees and the rabbi stood there, his face grave, and married the son of the prostitute to Rebecca. She broke the glass herself and then said to the rabbi: In exile we married the Shekhinah, said my father, my father your uncle, married, in the cellar, a dead nation to restore her to life, and the people said: Behold, here lives a seamstress whose wedding speech is bewitchingly beautiful and she's a virgin and a widow and a divorcee.
Then Rebecca sold her property and disappeared. Once again these were times of riots, and aside from the singed smell of Jews, thirty-four witches were also burned in the city square. Rebecca stood and looked at the fire. The women's eyes were laughing and when they burned they cursed and shouted, but they weren't afraid. A vindictive cold overflowed from them and s
inged the fire. What Rebecca saw, as she put it, was divine disobedience, she loved that sight, and felt as if she were looking in the mirror. Rebecca Sorka who came to the Land of Israel as Rebecca Schneerson would know that look inside her and would live with it all her life. Rebecca Secret Charity had curved, rounded cheeks, lips and some mysterious expression stamped in her gold-green eyes. She has a mute and ancient look, said one of the fellows who tried not to think of her body, she inherited that from the place where time was before it was created. In the cemetery she would eat her daily meal with her dead husband and feel close to her father, Secret Charity, with whom she could talk. He'd stand in the coffin and she'd sit on the edge of the grave and converse with him in a whisper.
She didn't stay very long in our city either but took off and opened a sewing shop in a nearby town. She learned to weave and embroider in a form that would match her father's phrases. She captured the melody for which the embroidery could have been a mantle, as if she was wrapping webs of dream on tree trunks. One day a Jew came to the city who was neither young nor old. Around his neck hung a sign that said: "Jew son of Jew, tortured and saved, please help this mute man who saw horror and returned from it," and it was signed by five well-known rabbis. Rebecca saw him walking in the street from the door of her workshop and the Jews read the sign, looked into his eyes where dread was frozen, tried to approach, and he repelled. Rebecca put on one of the wedding gowns she had just finished sewing and went outside with her assistant. Her dress dazzled the man's eyes. He came to her as if some force were drawing him to her. Tears flowed from his eyes and melted immediately. She saw Secret Charity and took pity on her father. The gown she wore was the gown of the daughter of Rabbi Yakub the Mountain. The stranger entered her workshop and the assistant brought him a glass of water. He looked at Rebecca and she felt he saw through her. The rhythm of his movements was like the melody that would bubble up in her when she sewed. Thus she understood that the man knew the melody of the holy books and the combinations of letters he may have inherited from her father. Since he wanted to speak he opened his mouth wide but no sound came out and then he again drank the water he'd been given. Rebecca, who had put on the wedding gown that wasn't hers, said: I'll call you Secret Charity after my father, his memory for a blessing, and the stranger nodded as if to say: that was, is, and will be my name. As a sign of gratitude, he fixed on her a tranquil look whose dread was dimmed for a moment; the look had a boldness that shook the folds of her gown and for the first time in her life she felt her body cling to the gown she was wearing, his look was demanding, soft and without pressure, and she saw his bitter despair, quiet and sure of himself. After they married they moved to our city to be close to her father's grave. She left as Secret Charity and returned as Secret Charity.
On the day she returned the man started speaking. He stood at the grave of Rebecca's father and suddenly words came into his mouth. At first he stammered, then he spoke fluently. Since for many years he hadn't talked, he couldn't tell exactly what had happened to him and after he mourned for the fate of the nation, he started seeing his wife with the same eyes others had seen her and he started longing for her. But he knew how to muffle his longing to intensify the malice and terror she sought in him. She gave him two living children and two dead ones. The two living ones were Rebecca and Joseph de la Rayna. She got special permission to name her daughter after herself, and she named her son Joseph de la Rayna. She wanted her son to be named after a bold sinner. Her son studied fervently with the persecutors of the messiah, refused to think of messianism that still filled hearts with savagery, lusted for the restrictions he imposed on himself and changed his name to Joseph Rayna and after he touched his mother and felt that like everybody else he also saw her as a naked woman, he went to another city, studied with a strict and handsome rabbi who spat whenever the name of those abominations was brought up by one of his students and forbade Joseph to mention his grandfather Secret Charity and his mother. Joseph married a young woman who brought a considerable dowry and a debilitating kidney disease and served as rabbi in a small town where he almost reluctantly inducted young men into the army of the Lord, put sticks in their hands, and even though he knew he was committing a grave sin, made them swear to wage heroic war and also added a formula of miracles he had learned from his rabbi; they had to learn to be defeated heroically, he said, but in his heart he dissented. When he was scolded for the sticks he gave the lads, he claimed he had a dream and in it he was told what to do, and he repented and to the day she died he didn't see his mother who poured into his soul the savage passions he wanted so much to suppress in himself. His wife groaned in her illness, his children were thin and pale, and he'd go to his sister Rebecca, sit with her, hold her hand, and fervently speak evil of his mother and his grandfather and say, Mother's damned sorcery. His sister bore in her heart the memory of the nights when they would adjure angels and devils and call on Satan. Since she was also afraid of his passions, she married a man so short and anonymous she could barely have remembered his name if he hadn't been killed a year later by a group of bored priests when she was in the last months of her pregnancy. She gave birth to a son and sat with her brother who had meanwhile become a widower and asked on what day did Our Rabbi Moses die? When she found out that Moses died on the seventh of Adar, she measured the days and the hours, went to her mother, asked her to sew her a beautiful wedding gown and her mother didn't ask a thing and sat down and sewed her daughter a wedding gown, and on the seventh of Adar at one o'clock in the morning, Rebecca, daughter of Rebecca Secret Charity, died wearing the wedding gown her mother made her and that looked like a shroud more than a gown. Rebecca Secret Charity lived many more years, her husband died as he stood at the window and saw somebody who may have been the messiah Frank whom Rebecca's father once saw at that window riding a horse. Even as she was dying, Rebecca looked as beautiful as in her youth. A thin channel of malice was stretched on her face. She didn't die like other people but became transparent, and one day she smiled to herself, lay down in bed, and died. In her death she looked like a dead butterfly stuck with a pin on white paper. That was a winter day and rain sprayed and her son, who stood next to her, wept, and when he wept people saw the tears stop and stand still in the air between his eyes and the open grave. Jews said they didn't remember such an event since Secret Charity stopped the moon for three whole nights. The tears, said the Jews, looked like wooden birds; both birds and fixed, not moving. From the grave rose a tune. People thought it was the song of the choir of the Temple. Not far from there, Secret Charity was buried standing up. On his tombstone stood a crow, and that's how Secret Charity could have seen his daughter's grave.
Tape / -
Joseph Rayna grew up and didn't know his forefathers. His father pondered ancient books in secret and his mother was a thin; bright-eyed woman. Joseph was the sort of child you see sometimes at the entrance to Paradise: beautiful children, sorrowful and cruel, who serve as minions of gods who amuse themselves with them. His curls weren't shorn and his eyes were green-gold like the eyes of a demon and wrapped in ovalish ellipses like the rustle of a butterfly's wing.
When he attended heder, the children would make fun of him. He'd fix them with his serene and arrogant look and they'd be awed. Later one of the children said that Joseph had a green halo around his head and sometimes he'd turn himself into glass and you could see through him. But his eyes, said the child, remained opaque with savagery and they penetrated me and I saw dogs and wolves preying on humans on mountains I had never seen in my life.
Afterward Joseph's father moved to the other side of the city. He read ancient writings left by Secret Charity the father of his grandfather, who had to be willingly ravished to bring repair, and he converted.
Joseph's mother, busy with her embarrassing love for her son, followed her husband. Joseph was baptized and given a name nobody remembered anymore. Like his grandfather's father, her husband sat in a cellar and made kiddush secretly to keep the commandments o
f God in secret. Once when Joseph fell asleep in the park a group of young girls passed by him. They were shaken at the sight of him, stopped and looked at him. He woke up but didn't open his eyes and they couldn't resist the temptation and touched him, they shrieked and fled in panic. He opened his eyes slowly and looked serenely at their panicky running. Some man who stood there and caught them red-handed scolded them, one of the girls who feared the rage of her father, a district officer, said: He tried to play with us, and so a policeman appeared at Joseph's house and took him to prison. In prison Joseph was beaten and the police called him filthy Jew, and asked why did you do that, and he said quietly: I'm not a Jew and I'm not filthy and I didn't do a thing. The police were scared when he talked because he laughed as he spoke while they beat him harshly. His demon's eyes were shrouded in a harsh and indulgent dusk and they were forced to put him in solitary confinement. The girl who told her father the officer the story had a nightmare that night, repented, went to church and confessed, and the priest told her forget everything and say eighteen Ave Marias but she went to her father and told him. Her father, who was a person who had a conscience but also a position in the city, went to the prison and released Joseph. Outside, he slapped Joseph's face and said: I don't know who's lying and who's not, but you get the benefit of the doubt. Joseph looked at the hand that had hit him and said to the district officer: Some day you'll find that hand outside your body and whether there is a God or not, your punishment is already prepared and is found in the air, I see it and it will strike you. The man was stunned, and by the time he finished thinking confused thoughts that ran around in his brain, Joseph left. About a year later his hand was lopped off and then he was afflicted with a serious illness and when he searched for Joseph, he was no longer to be found. Then Joseph started writing his poems.
To get around himself like his grandfather Secret Charity, he wrote the poems in Hebrew, which he remembered from his days in heder. He would illustrate his poems with stylized drawings and his mother would hang them on cords around her bed. His father joined a group of monks who wanted to prepare the Holy Inquisition in the Ukraine and Poland. In those monkish rituals, Joseph's father was tortured with richly imaginative instruments of torture the monks tried to copy from old books brought from Spain two hundred years earlier. He sensed that by that humiliation he woke hidden forces from their slumber. Then the father disappeared and in a letter that came to Joseph's mother two years later the father wrote: Ever since I read Karl Marx, my world has changed. I abandoned the flayers who sell opium to the masses. The future is latent in the class war that will come and in which the working man will defeat the parasites, in the new world there will no longer be the exploiters and the exploited, no Christians, no Jews, no Muslims, but only workers and those who stand in the way of the revolution have to be burned. Yours always. Joseph's mother went on praying to the old gods, but her passion for her son made her feel very guilty and the fact that she didn't yearn for her husband sharpened those feelings and so, to justify her life, she joined a group calling themselves messianic Christians.
